When I was piecing together my two-part Hive-Blog article titled “Meet A Hysterical Self-Appointed Pedo-Expert” regarding the controversy over a dating relationship between an 18-year-old female YouTuber named Ariadna Juarez and a 13-year-old boy named Damian Gurrusquieta that started out back in the summer of 2018, the subject of a similar controversial relationship that the late Zola Taylor had with the late Frankie Lymon back in 1956 came to mind. I was going to mention about it therein. However, after considering all the different circumstances that factored into that same forbidden relationship back in 1956, I decided that it warranted a Hive-Blog article of its own.
Like most of you Hiveans, Hivians, and Hivers out there who may be reading this article of mine, I had not yet been born in the 1950s. However, I am well aware that the 1950s has a reputation of being a very conservative decade.
All any of us have to do is watch a rerun of Happy Days to know that parents imposed many more rules on their teenage kids as for dating and socializing than they do nowadays. On some cable television channels, you may still be able to view reruns of sitcoms from that decade in the form of Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show that will give you firsthand knowledge of what being a teenager was like back in those days in terms of family values that parents instilled in their children.
Most of us have heard that premarital sex was almost unheard of back in the 1950s here in the United States of America, especially among teenagers. However, whenever the topic of entertainers and forbidden love comes up, the first thing that comes to mind with most of us is Jerry Lee Lewis’s marriage to Myra Gale Brown in 1957.
Jerry Lee Lewis was 21 years old and Myra Gale Brown was 13 years old when they got married. Moreover, they were blood-related to each other. Their marriage has sparked great controversy to this very day.
Sometimes people will bring up the fact that the late Elvis Presley was 24 years old and Priscilla Presley (then known as Priscilla Beaulieu) was only 14 years old when they fell in love with each other back in 1959, but usually they will give the late Elvis Presley a free pass inasmuch as he was the King of Rock-And-Roll. In any event, what seems to have gotten so very little attention through the years in that regard is the late Zola Taylor’s sizzling romance with the late Frankie Lymon back in 1956.
1. The Late Zola Taylor And The Late Frankie Lymon Were Musical Legends In The 1950s
In case any of you Hiveans, Hivians, and Hivers are unfamiliar with either one of these celebrities from the 1950s, allow me to provide you with their respective backgrounds. The late Zola Taylor was originally a solo artist until she joined The Platters in 1954, which was when her popularity as a musician began to take off by leaps and bounds.
The late Ms. Taylor and The Platters released songs that were a mixture of rock-and-roll, rhythm and blues, doo-wop and love ballads. One of her biggest hits with The Platters was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The YouTube video below provides you with a sample of that same song.
The Song Titled “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” By The Late Zola Taylor And The Platters
The late Frankie Lymon also made 1954 a very big year for himself. He joined The Teenagers (then known as The Premiers), and his music career skyrocketed in popularity shortly thereafter.
Similarly to the late Zola Taylor and The Platters, the late Frankie Lymon and his group performed songs that were a mixture of rock-and-roll, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, and even gushy love ballads. One of the late Mr. Lymon’s biggest hits with The Teenagers was “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The YouTube video below provides you with a sample of that same song.
The Song Titled “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” By The Late Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers
Adolescents all over the world fell in love with the music of the late Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers as well as that of the late Zola Taylor and The Platters in the 1950s. The late Frankie Lymon and the late Zola Taylor had both become icons of American pop culture.
It can be no mystery why the late Mr. Lymon and the late Ms. Taylor both felt that they had so much in common by the time they hooked up with each other and started a sizzling romance in 1956. However, there was just one major characteristic that they did not have in common at all. That characteristic was their respective ages. The late Frankie Lymon was 13 years old and the late Zola Taylor was 22 years old when the two singers and musicians became romantically involved with each other back in 1956.
2. The Late Zola Taylor Had A Forbidden Romance With The Late Frankie Lymon In 1956
Back in 2005 or early 2006 when I was surfing around on the Internet, I stumbled across an article about the sizzling romance that the late Zola Taylor had with the late Frankie Lymon when she was 22 years old and the late Mr. Lymon was only 13 years old back in 1956. I did further research on the topic to verify that it was true, and, sure enough, there was information all over the Internet showing that the late Frankie Lymon had been born on September 30, 1942 and that the late Zola Taylor had been born on March 17, 1934, making them both eight and a half years apart in age difference and definitely on opposite sides of the legal age line when they hooked up with each other in 1956.
It baffled me why nobody had ever really made a fuss about their age-gap relationship from 1956, because back in 2006 everyone was still ranting and raving about R. Kelly’s marriage to Gladys Knight’s niece, the late Aaliyah, in the mid-1990s when he was 27 years old and the late Aaliyah was only 15 years old. In fact, people still talk about it today.
What made me laugh back when I was researching the story behind the late Zola Taylor and the late Frankie Lymon was when I also stumbled across an article on the Internet that described the late Zola Taylor as being only 16 years old when she hooked up with the late Frankie Lymon in 1956. I figured that it had to have been one of her public-relations managers who got that article posted to the Internet to put a buffer on the whole event before it evolved into a belated sex scandal.
That is, the article was meant to rewrite history so that people would view the late Ms. Taylor’s sizzling romance with the late Mr. Lymon as nothing more than a little bit of harmless sexual experimentation between two curious teenage minors who were only two and a half years apart in age difference, so to speak. However, anyone who researched it all in depth had to know that the late Ms. Taylor had no way of hiding the fact that she was once an adult woman in her twenties who had a passionate relationship with a male musician barely in his teens like the plot of the 1971 film titled Summer of ’42. Or did she?
3. The Truth About The Late Zola Taylor And The Late Frankie Lymon’s Age Difference In 1956 Appears To Have Been Covered Up
Recently as I was surfing throughout the Internet to revisit the story behind the late Zola Taylor’s sizzling 1956 romance with the late Frankie Lymon, I encountered something very interesting. At this point in time, most every website that had information regarding the late Ms. Taylor reported her date of birth as March 17, 1938 instead of as March 17, 1934.
There was even an online article that described the late Ms. Taylor as a minor when she had first become sexually involved with the late Mr. Lymon in 1956. Therein the late Ms. Taylor was described as having been 17 years old and the late Mr. Lymon was described as having been 14 years old when they first hooked up with each other.
Ironically, people in the comments section of that same online article still didn’t seem to give the late Ms. Taylor’s relationship with the late Mr. Lymon their seal of approval, but the fact still stands that she was really 22 years old back then and the late Mr. Lymon had not yet turned fourteen when he met her and became sexually involved with her.
Where it got really hilarious was when I came across an online article that actually reported the late Ms. Taylor to have been even a HALF A YEAR YOUNGER THAN MR. LYMON when she first hooked up with him in 1956. Therein the late Ms. Taylor is described as having been born on March 17, 1943, which would have made her and the late Mr. Lymon both 13 years old when they hooked up with each other in 1956.
At this point in time, it became apparent to me that the late Ms. Taylor’s family had likely had her public-relations manager contact every website that he or she could find on the Internet that had information about the late Ms. Taylor and get them to change her date of birth in a way that would make her appear to have been close in age to the late Mr. Lymon back in 1956. Perhaps they had even gone as far as hiring an expert reputation-management company to pursue those same modifications on the Internet.
In any event, after the late Ms. Taylor died in 2007, it was clear that her surviving family members did not want for her reputation to be unjustly absorbed into the cesspool of pedophile-panic propaganda that usually ensues whenever the public gets wind that an adult celebrity was having a rendezvous with an underage individual. It is only understandable that they did not want all of the self-proclaimed child advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts of the world to feast upon her past after she had died and could, therefore, no longer speak in her defense, especially when none of these people had ever known her personally.
Now, some of you may be saying that perhaps I have made a mistake in remembering the article I had read on the Internet back in 2005 or early 2006 about the late Zola Taylor’s sizzling romance with the late Frankie Lymon back in 1956 when the late Ms. Taylor was 22 years old and the late Mr. Lymon was only 13 years old. However, it wasn’t only one article on the Internet that described this same revelation but a whole myriad of articles that I had come across online back in 2005 or early 2006. Moreover, I eventually was recently able to find articles regarding the late Ms. Taylor’s true date of birth of March 17, 1934 that had remained intact.
One of those online articles originates from The Telegraph in the United Kingdom. Another one of those online articles originates from The Times News Service (the Sunday Times) in both the United Kingdom and South Africa. Both of those articles were published shortly after the late Ms. Taylor’s death in 2007, and obviously whoever was going around on the Internet, changing her date of birth to make her younger than her actual age to protect her reputation was unable to get to those two press agencies to convince them to change their information in that manner.
In light of the above information herein and in accordance with conversations of mine with different people who had been old enough to have been alive in the 1950s and to have remembered that decade, allow me to provide my feedback on this matter. First of all, I have seen pictures and video clips of the late Zola Taylor from that time era, and I can confidently say that the late Ms. Taylor was not 10 or 11 years old back when she joined The Platters in 1954.
People who lived and remembered those times explained to me that it was virtually unheard of back then for a 10- or 11-year-old girl to look like a woman in her late teens or early twenties despite that now and then we hear about pre-teenage girls who have fitted that description in the recent past in the form of Danielle Cohn and YouTuber Melody Oficial.
Also, I stumbled across an online article in which the late Zola Taylor’s date of birth is reported to be both March 17, 1934 and March 17, 1938. Therefore, it becomes evident that the late Ms. Taylor was not likely a mere 17 years old when she first hooked up with the late Frankie Lymon in 1956.
Moreover, the late Ms. Taylor and the late Mr. Lymon met and hooked up with each other during the “Biggest Rock n Roll Show of 1956” tour than ran from April to June of 1956. There is even an online article that reports that the late Ms. Taylor met the late Mr. Lymon on that tour. Therefore, the late Mr. Lymon was only 13 years old when Ms. Taylor first met him and began having sexual relations with him in 1956, and he would not be 14 years old until September 30th of that same year.
4. The Late Zola Taylor Did Not Abuse The Late Frankie Lymon Or Cause Any Of His Problems
The late Frankie Lymon began abusing drugs when he was 15 years old, and his deadly habit eventually ended his life in 1968 when he was 25 years old. In the mid-1980s, it came out in the press and the media that the late Frankie Lymon had been involved in bigamy, and the late Zola Taylor had claimed to be one of his three wives.
At a trial that would decide the fate of a generous amount of money that was owed to the late Mr. Lymon, the late Ms. Taylor insisted that she had married him in the 1960s; but ultimately she was unable to produce any documented evidence to support that claim. By that point in time, she could not hide the fact that she had become sexually involved with him when she was 22 years old and he was still only 13 years old back in 1956.
After the court trial that disclosed the fact that the late Mr. Lymon was a bigamist was turned into a movie in 1998, the director of that film did everything he could to prevent the public at large from knowing that the late Mr. Lymon was still a minor when he became involved with the late Ms. Taylor. He felt that the public simply wasn’t ready to wrap their heads around the fact that a famous female vocal from The Platters had been involved in a forbidden love affair with a 13-year-old boy when she was 22 years old. At least the American public wasn’t ready for it according to him, that is.
Nevertheless, there is a saying that one should not speak ill of the dead, and this particular case is no exception to that rule. Both the late Frankie Lymon and the late Zola Taylor have been deceased for some time now.
It is more than obvious that the late Ms. Taylor’s family did everything they could to keep the age-related details of her 1956 relationship with the late Mr. Lymon as low-key as possible, because they didn’t want all of the self-proclaimed child advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts to tear the late Ms. Taylor’s reputation apart.
Now, I’m sure that some of you reading my article here are probably thinking that the late Frankie Lymon looked like such a clean-cut kid back in 1956 that he appeared like someone who never even got a detention in school or even had to sign the tardy book. For the most part, the late Mr. Lymon was a good person. However, he was not inexperienced with women by the time he met the late Ms. Taylor.
By the time that the late Mr. Lymon was 10 years old, he was very streetwise. He had grown up in Harlem, New York. Prostitutes in his neighborhood gave him commissions for bringing them customers when he was still 10 years old. Shortly thereafter, he eventually became known for dating women twice his age.
In the two YouTube videos below showing clips from a documentary about the late Mr. Lymon that appeared on E Entertainment, people who knew the late Mr. Lymon report that he would have affairs with women 25 years old and older when he was only 14 and 15 years old. Therefore, the late Ms. Taylor was not the first significantly older woman with whom the late Mr. Lymon had sexual intercourse during his adolescent years, and she would not be the last.
A Documentary About The Late Frankie Lymon On E Entertainment
After seeing both videos above, it becomes quite clear that the late Zola Taylor did not rob the late Frankie Lymon of his innocence in 1956, even though he was only 13 years old and she was eight and a half years older than him when they first hooked up with each other and began having sexual intercourse. Now, should the late Mr. Lymon have been engaging in all of the naughty things that he did before and after he met the late Ms. Taylor at his age? Probably not. However, he did not have the same kind of upbringing that most youngsters his age from his generation had.
The late Mr. Lymon grew up in a rough part of New York City, and he was someone who simply had to make the best of his circumstances. I realize that there will be people who will disagree with me on this topic.
Did the late Ms. Taylor take advantage of the late Mr. Lymon and manipulate him in view of their age difference at the outset of their sizzling romantic relationship in 1956? Did she betray his trust? No, she didn’t. The late Morris Levy was the one who took advantage of the late Mr. Lymon and manipulated him, and he betrayed the late Mr. Lymon’s trust.
The late Mr. Levy may not have had sexual intercourse with the late Mr. Lymon when he was still a teenager or anything of that nature, but what he did do was rip him off at every chance he got. He did so by taking over just about every aspect of the late Mr. Lymon’s career and leaving him ultimately destitute insofar as he was eventually driven to overdosing on drugs. Mr. Levy was a mobster and a shyster, and his untimely death in 1990 could not have been soon enough after all the horrible things that he did to the late Mr. Lymon and even his loved ones.
If the late Zola Taylor did anything to the late Mr. Lymon by getting involved with him the way she did back in 1956, she showered him with love, affection, and understanding; and she gave him her heart. Even if she was eight and a half years older than him, I do not believe that she was ever in a relationship with him back then just for the sex. She obviously was in love with him, and he was in love with her.
Perhaps because of the kind of childhood the late Mr. Lymon had before then, he simply felt that he was incompatible with girls his own age in a loving relationship. Therefore, he felt the need to hook up with an older woman like the late Ms. Taylor.
Did the late Ms. Taylor commit “statutory rape” against the late Mr. Lymon? From a legal standpoint, she likely did not do so.
Back in the 1950s, there was no state jurisdiction in the United States of America that I’m aware of that prosecuted women for violating the statutory-age-of-consent laws. “Statutory rape” was a legal construct back then in which the laws encompassing it only applied to men and boys who were old enough to be prosecuted for it.
It was not until perhaps the 1990s that state jurisdictions throughout our nation actually began passing laws that prosecuted women for having sexual relations with anyone below the statutory age of consent in any given state jurisdiction. Therefore, the late Ms. Taylor could not be guilty of any crime for which a law did not exist at the time.
Did the late Mr. Lymon make mistakes in his youth that costed him dearly later on? He made a few here and there, but, overall, he was a good person and he made many people happy with his music. One of the late Mr. Lymon's biggest mistakes was getting involved in heavy drugs when he was 15 years old.
It was the 1950s then, and most people didn’t know very much about drug abuse inasmuch as the counterculture movement that popularized illegal drugs would not surface for another decade. Therefore, very few people really knew what the late Mr. Lymon was going through once he became addicted to heroin and other illegal drugs. Nobody really knew how to help him overcome something that they did not fully understand themselves and were not educated about.
Another very big mistake of the late Mr. Lymon was leaving The Teenagers to pursue a career as a solo artist in 1957, because he and his band members had a very tight-knit relationship with one another that gave them all confidence to perform on stage and on camera as singers and musicians. Once the late Mr. Lymon began appearing on stage and on camera as a solo artist in the late 1950s, his confidence began to falter and the fact that his voice was going through unfavorable changes because of puberty did not help the situation. However, who can ever predict the future?
The late Mr. Lymon had a sad ending in 1968. The drugs did him in, but the late Morris Levy was greatly responsible for that tragedy.
The late Mr. Lymon had turned to the late Mr. Levy in desperation after all the times that the late Mr. Levy had shafted him, and the late Mr. Levy simply turned his back on him. Anyone who saw the 1998 movie titled Why Do Fools Fall in Love knows about this whole deception that the late Mr. Levy continued to inflict upon the late Mr. Lymon at every chance he got.
5. My Conclusion To This Topic
The late Frankie Lymon had a less-than-perfect childhood before he embarked upon a career as a singer and musician at the tender age of twelve. Despite that numerous online sources report that the late Zola Taylor was born either on March 17, 1938 or March 17, 1943, strong evidence shows that she was really 22 years old in 1956 when she became romantically involved with the late Frankie Lymon, who was 13 years old then; and their relationship immediately became a sexual one. Therefore, she had to have been born on March 17, 1934 as certain online sources have reported for a long time.
The late Mr. Lymon did not go into his relationship with the late Ms. Taylor inexperienced and unprepared to handle the fact that the late Ms. Taylor was eight and a half years older than him and he was barely in his teens. Dating older women had become a way of life for him by the time that he met the late Ms. Taylor, and he had already been sexually active with other women significantly older than him.
The late Ms. Taylor did not commit any crime in becoming involved with the late Mr. Lymon back in 1956, because the statutory-rape laws throughout our nation could not be used to prosecute women back then. The only really bad person in the late Mr. Lymon’s life was the late Morris Levy, who strongly deserves to be branded as a predator and a criminal.
In a nutshell, the late Ms. Taylor was not a cradle robber, because the late Mr. Lymon had left the cradle long before he had met her; and when they did meet, the late Ms. Taylor had only intended to love him and respect him rather than exploit him. Moreover, the late Ms. Taylor was definitely not a pedophile.
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